April 20th Archives - Big Gay Picture Show

Beauty (Skoonheid) (Cinema)

April 19, 2012 By Tim Isaac Leave a Comment

Starring: Deon Lotz, Charlie Keegan, Michelle Scott
Director: Oliver Hermanus
Running Time: 98 mins
Certificate: 18
Release Date: April 20th, 2012

Winner of the Queer Palm at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Beauty is one of those films on queer themes which stretches beyond just a gay audience. It’s a thought-provoking film full of tension, which will stay in your head long after the credits role.

Francois (Deon Lotz) is a middle-aged man living in South Africa. On the surface everything seems perfectly fine, although his marriage seems utterly devoid of any sign of affection. However his life is actually a morass of contradictions, so that he hates gay people, but goes off to retreats to have sex with others men (although actual gays and blacks are banned from these occasions). He seems to have everything pretty much under control though until he meets Christian (Charlie Keegan), the son of a long-lost friend. [Read more…]

Lifeboat (Blu-ray)

April 19, 2012 By Tim Isaac Leave a Comment

Starring: Tallulah Bankhead, Hume Cronyn, Walter Slezak
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Running Time: 96 mins
Certificate: PG
Release Date: April 20th, 2012

Lifeboat is one of those movies a lot of people have heard about, but relatively few have seen. While it came before most of Hitchcock’s most famous movies – although after his Best Picture Oscar-winning Rebecca – it’s a classic that’s worth visiting. After a German U-boat torpedoes an allied ship, a group of disparate survivors gather on a lifeboat. Told completely from within the confines of the boat, the men and women aboard realise their predicament is a hairy one and that their best chance of survival is to make for Bermuda.

The problem is that none of them know where Bermuda is. However there’s one person on board who does appear to be able to navigate, a German U-boat survivor who might have been the captain of the vessel. But can they trust him? [Read more…]

The Divide (Cinema)

April 18, 2012 By Tim Isaac Leave a Comment

Starring: Lauren German, Milo Ventimiglia, Michael Biehn, Rosanna Arquette
Director: Xavier Gens
Running Time: 112 mins
Certificate: 18
Release Date: April 20th, 2012

I think it’s safe to say that if you want a nice, jolly couple of hours, The Divide probably isn’t the best movie to watch. It’s dark, relentlessly pessimistic, often unpleasant and more than a little depressing. It’s certainly not completely without merit, but it ain’t fun.

In the great, no fuss opening, a nuclear explosion is tearing through New York City and a group of random people race for the safety of a basement/slash bomb shelter. The owner of the basement, Mickey (Michael Biehn), doesn’t want them down there, but with radiation swirling above, he doesn’t have much choice. [Read more…]

Salmon Fishing In The Yemen (Cinema)

April 16, 2012 By Tim Isaac Leave a Comment

Starring: Emily Blunt, Ewan McGregor, Amr Waked, Kristin Scott Thomas
Director: Lasse Hallstrom
Running Time: 106 mins
Certificate: 12A
Release Date: April 20th, 2012

Dr. Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor) is a buttoned down man living a buttoned down life. He works as a scientist at the Department Of Agriculture & Fisheries, working on projects that will only be of interest to a tiny few fishermen and wishes nothing more than to be left alone to get on with his studies. Outside his job his marriage is stuck in a rut, where it feels like things have reached an end, but nobody wants to say it.

Things begin to chance when he’s forced to go to a meeting with Harriet (Emily Blunt), who looks after the UK holdings of a ridiculously wealthy sheikh (Amr Waked). The sheikh has a dream – to bring salmon fishing to the Yemen. Without spending any time thinking about it, Fred brands the project ludicrous and decides the sort of person who’d want to do must be incredibly selfish, putting their passions ahead of their people. [Read more…]